Welp, couldn’t stay away for long. I bought a 92 RRC to restore in July 2019 and an 03 DII about two weeks ago. It has 04 roof rails for those wondering.
I just replaced the floorboards in the RRC as well as the heater core and the blower motor. While I had the dash out, I recovered it in leather and I’ve dyed a lot of the plastic black. The plan is a full black interior with rustic tan seats and fresh alpine white paint. When I bought this I drove it 100 miles home, and have slowly been fixing it up. I’ve only put about 700 miles on it total though. I’ll do the driver floor repair in the spring and then the rust will all be taken care of. It has a slow coolant drip on the driver front cylinder head gasket so I haven’t been driving it much, especially with the interior currently fitted. Never overheated but I figure there’s no rush since it’s a slow project. Interior sound deadening and restore is my current priority, then drivetrain, then exterior repaint.
I was totally fine with selling my disco, but then one day last summer I saw a new discovery 5 at the county fair being raffled and it got me curious Into land rovers again. Then a friend was selling his 92 RRC for super cheap on Facebook a few hours away, so I jumped on it. Two weeks later I got curious about my old truck and contacted the guy in Virginia who bought it. Turns out he resold it a month later after fixing the engine issues for about $3k. He didn’t have their info anymore, but saw it with a forsale sign in the local high school parking lot. I really wanted to buy it back but couldn’t afford what they wanted after having just bought my first house, so I’ve been lamenting the loss ever since. They next owner bought it as a father-son project and they did a lot of work to it make it like-new again. I deleted their contact info and lost touch of where it ended up.
For the last year, I’ve been looking at LR3s and LR4s, but the disco kept calling me back. I figured with their values rising and most trucks out there now being trashed, my chances were getting slimmer to find a nice example for a reasonable price. I missed out on 3 other trucks before I found this new one. Granted, they were all more expensive than I wanted to spend, so I’m glad this one worked out and I was able to pick it up for under 10k. In hindsight, I wish I had kept the original disco. It would’ve been cheaper in the end, but it was the right decision to buy a tundra (i.e. reliable vehicle) while I built up my business.
The 03 disco is my new DD. It has a 2000 P38 4.6 block in it, which were built with better tooling than the 03-04 4.6 blocks that crack and have slipped liners often. The PO rebuilt the most of the engine 14k miles ago: new head gaskets, valve job, new oil pan seal and front cover seal, oil pump, pulleys, updated cooling system with the inline t-stat mod,new fluids everywhere. It feels as nice as the original disco i had in this thread, but added piece of mind with the better block. Got it with just under 91,000 miles and have already but about 1500 miles on it. Needs a roof repaint and a few little Interior fixes, but it’s great. My plan is to hopefully take it to 200,000+ miles.
I bought a one-way ticket and drove it 900 miles home without issue. The drive from philly to Nashville was beautiful with all the early November foliage.
No modifications planned currently. Just gonna enjoy this one stock for a while and take it camping and mountain biking. I’d like to change the tcase, and do a lift, tires, and armor like my last one, but i kinda like it being stock for now. It drives really nice on the 18s and nitro terra grapplers. Lifetime Cali truck until last year when the PO drove it cross country to PA where it’s lived for just over a year. Almost non existent rust. Just a little bit of surface rust here and there. All common problem areas are currently addressed or updated. It was a steal of a find. My kid is 6 months old now, so the plan is to get further along on the Range Rover and then build the disco up to take him out. I grew up riding 4wheelers with my dad and this will be a fun connection with my boy lien I had with my dad.
I probably won’t update this thread much but for those who knew me when I built my last truck, I’m updating my Instagram these days under @Tnrovers. I’m in Nashville now.
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